She had to give urine samples at half-hour intervals, for three hours; she had to drink quarts of water to generate the raw material. She had to give blood six times. In the end the veins in both her arms collapsed from repeated pricking.

In the midst of the physicals, she went through psychological tests: playing with blocks, drawing self-portraits, completing a five-hundred-question multiple-choice personality test. There were IQ tests, Rorschach inkblot tests, memory tests, vocabulary tests, tests of math and reading.

She went through a written paper on her “personal values,” which sought to examine the motives she had for going into space. She labored over the fifty questions, covering possible motives like money and fame, the good of mankind, and the thrill of it all, as well as the possibility of scientific discovery.

On her first pass through, York tried to answer honestly. Of course, it’s the scientific discovery They’re selecting mission specialists here! What the hell else do they expect? But then she wondered if she ought to try to be smarter. It would be a bad thing to seem unbalanced, obsessed about the science to all else. Any astronaut, even a specialist, was going to have to help out with the chores. And besides, the Mars crew was going to have to be presentable to the press, projecting the right all-American, NASA-tradition, John Glenn — wholesome image.

She went through her scores again, trying to anticipate what the selectors might be looking for.

Then she figured that all the other candidates would have worked this out as well and would similarly be doctoring their answers.

She went through a third time, trying to take that into account…

An earnest young man took her through a scatter chart rendered by a computer. He sounded puzzled by the results: here she showed herself to be dedicated to a single goal, there flexible and capable of balancing multiple objectives; over here the results said she was strongly self-motivated, but there she was coming up as happiest working with a team… and so forth. It was a complex, meaningless dance.

She gritted her teeth and tried not to say anything to make it worse. She wondered how much all this was costing.

One morning she was given barium sulfate for breakfast, to provide contrast in X-rays of her gall bladder. Another time she was provided with a tritium solution, so her percentage of body fat could be measured. She took pills which gave her diarrhea, and which caused her piss to come out green. In the EEG test, eleven needles were poked half an inch into her scalp.

Even her teeth were checked over. A cheerful, inane dentist tut-tutted over her mouth’s state of disrepair, and he seemed to take a lot of comfort in telling her in great detail how much preventative dental work she’d have to endure. You don’t want toothache or an abscess halfway across the Solar System, ho ho!